I saw this video on Tom Ascol’s blog, and I had to repost it here:
I, too, join Tom in thanking Eros for his incredible skill as a translator. When I spoke for FIEL a few years ago, Eros made the work so much easier. But he and I also had a wonderful time talking together about the Lord and His truth. What makes the above clip from Tom Ascol so humorous for me is what happened during my time there. First, you might note that Eros and I look a bit alike. In fact, in this picture, Eros and I had decided to have some fun with that, so I lent him one of my famous loud ties just for the evening. You see, the first time I spoke, as we approached the podium, the crowd began to laugh. We looked at each other with a little puzzlement at first before we got the joke. So I began, “Look! I came all the way to Brazil just to find my long lost brother!” So we decided to take the next step and dress alike to play off on the twins idea. We got a good round of applause!
But what resonated most with Tom’s torture of Eros with all the next-to-impossible-to-translate idioms was what happened with the other speaker who was with me at the Fiel conference, Pat Campbell from the St. Louis area. Pat’s a great guy, but he just couldn’t rid himself of his use of idioms or poetry. No matter how hard he tried, he’d still end up trying to quote a line from a hymn or something like that. Eros told him he could do that, if he would just let him know ahead of time, so he could see if there was an already published version of the hymn in Portugese, for example. So by the end of the week, though Pat tried, when he’d get to where he was about to spout off some idiomatic line or poem, he’d turn red, get all embarrassed, and Eros would just shake his head and laugh. We were all in on the joke by then. To this day when I go to St. Louis and meet Pat we laugh about our trip to Brazil together.
In any case, I have very, very fond memories of my time in Brazil and especially of Eros Pasquini. May the Lord bless the Denhams, FIEL, and Eros as they labor for the Lord.
